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Saturday, September 27, 2014

The man is obscuring the message

My take on a less than satisfactory week for Labour's Ed Miliband. From today's Journal.

While on a personal level I was relieved at the outcome of
the Scottish independence referendum, there can be no doubt what the more
interesting result from a journalistic point of view would have been.

The counterfactual question ‘What would have happened if the
Scots had voted Yes?’ will, I suspect, become as moot a debating point in years
to come as ‘What would have happened if JFK had lived?’ or ‘What would have
happened if Thatcher had lost the Falklands?’

My guess, for what it’s worth is that David Cameron would by
now be an ex-Prime Minister, his status as the man who lost the Union having
finally provided his backbenchers with the longed-for excuse to send him
packing.

His replacement at No 10 would have been William Hague, one
of the few Tories to command respect across the spectrum and a convenient
stopgap for those seeking to block the claims of Chancellor George Osborne while
keeping the seat warm for Boris Johnson.

And Ed Miliband?Well,
I suspect he might soon have been on his way too.After all, had the Scottish vote gone the
other way, it would have been primarily down to his failure to connect with
Labour’s traditional supporters north of the border.

It took an eleventh-hour intervention by Gordon Brown to
deliver Labour’s voters into the no camp, though the former Prime Minister
remains such an unperson in senior party circles that Mr Miliband did not even see
fit to thank him in his conference speech this week.

But of course the Scots voted no, and both Mr Cameron and
his Labour opposite number lived to fight another day, albeit with their
reputations badly scarred.

And with the general election now less than eight months
away, it is clear that both men face an uphill battle to convince the public of
their Prime Ministerial credentials.

Mr Cameron, of course, has the advantage in this regard in
that he is already doing the job, but he seems to be held in growing contempt
by an increasing number of otherwise natural Tory voters.

His casual failure this week to observe the first rule of
Prime Ministerial conduct – that you don’t drag the Monarch into politics – was
seen by some as indicative not just of a lack of gravitas, but a lack of basic
intelligence.

As for poor Mr Miliband, everyone I speak to who is
unconnected with politics seems to regard him as quite simply the dullest man
in Britain.

His keynote conference speech this week was perhaps his last
big chance before the election to shift that perception – but sadly for him, it
appears to have further cemented it in the public mind.

Perhaps he wasn’t actually trying.Mr Miliband is smart enough to realise that
the he is never going to win on the personality stakes and, rather than attempt
to sell himself to the electorate in Tuesday’s speech, he set about trying to
sell an idea.

This, encapsulated in a single word, was the idea of
togetherness – a refinement of his ‘One Nation’ pitch of two years ago which
aimed to build on the success of the ‘Better Together’ campaign in Scotland.

Of itself, it’s a strong message, if one that – like his
£2.5bn pledge on funding the NHS - seems aimed more at shoring up Labour’s core
vote than reaching out to those of a more rightward-leaning disposition.

But it all got rather lost in Mr Miliband’s torpid manner of
delivery, while his failure to mention Labour’s plans for tackling the deficit handed
further plentiful ammunition to his opponents.

If renewed faith in the concept of ‘togetherness’ was one
upshot of the referendum, another was of course the revival of interest in
English devolution.

Mr Cameron’s plans for an English parliament within a
parliament met with a predictably dusty response this week from North-East MPs
and council leaders this week who realise it will do nothing to devolve power
and funding to the Northern regions.

The Labour leader, by contrast, spoke of the need for a
wholesale decentralisation of power throughout the country in what in may yet
become a major theme of his party’s election campaign.

In this, too, Mr Miliband’s instincts are entirely correct.But sadly for Labour, the man is currently obscuring
the message.

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."